University of Vienna, Austria and Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ)

Friday, November 20th, 2015 at 11:30:00 AM

Conference Room Querzoli LENS

Published on-line at 02:16:45 PM on Thursday, November 19th, 2015

New Frontiers in Quantum Optomechanics: from levitation to gravitational quantum physics

Cavity Optomechanical systems have originally been studied from the early 1970s on in the context of gravitational wave antennas.

Cavity Optomechanical systems have originally been
studied from the early 1970s on in the context of gravitational wave antennas.
The last few years have seen a completely new generation of nano and
microoptomechanical devices with diverse application domains ranging from
classical sensing to quantum information processing. The developments in the
field have even lead to a new coating technology for low-noise optical
precision interferometry.

One of the fascinating prospects of quantum
optomechanics is to coherently control the motional degree of freedom of a
massive object in an unprecedented parameter regime of large mass and long
coherence time, hence opening up a new avenue for macroscopic quantum
experiments. A possible way to achieve this is by coupling a trapped, levitated
object to an optical cavity field, hence strongly suppressing mechanical
dissipation effects of typical micro- and nanomechanical devices.

Another fascinating perspective is to use mechanical quantum systems for
testing low-energy consequences of possible quantum theories of gravity in
table-top experiments. One specific example requires the ability to perform
quantum non-demolition (QND) measurements of the mechanical motional
quadratures. I will report on the recent advancements that have been achieved
in these directions.